Mathami

unched Get Physical Music, has been the brains behind Groove Magazine – one of Europe’s premier electronic music publications - and founded Frankfurt’s only House club in the first half of the noughties, the Monza Club. At the end of 2015, after several previous trips, Thomas Koch arrived at the Sacred Valley in Peru to live amongst the local community with whom he had created bonds. During this time, he was invited to a small Ecstatic Dance ceremony of the Italian movement medicine teacher Laura Valenti, held 3000 meters high, in a house with a 360degrees view of the valley’s mountains. Koch, a passionate dancer since his childhood, had moments of revelation and deep connection during this and the other dances he visited. He realised that dancing in these ceremonial settings during daytime hours, with a set of rules and complete sobriety, surrounded by like-minded people that were gathering with the same intentions, brought him back to an approach to movement and dance that he had already had as a child and teenager. It made him incorporate a truth that he had always carried inside of him, but that had not come to complete understanding until this point: the endless potential of dance and movement as a healing and transformative power. In the first part of his journey with his new discovery, it was enough for him to dance at these small gatherings during his stays in Peru. But in spring 2018, when he came back to Berlin from another extended stay in the mountains, he wanted to check out what his hometown had to offer in terms of these events. Berlin’s longest-running event series of its kind was founded by Bhaya Theissen, aka DJ Vesica and Pascal de Lacaze-Duthiers, in 2010. At one of his first experiences there, he ended up dancing a stone’s throw from the famous Berghain club in the venue that Ecstatic Dance Berlin had been using for weekly events. It was there, dancing to a set of Scott Binder, a Berlin-based American DJ and producer when he had an epiphany: in all the years before in the Sacred Valley, he had worked with a lot of resident western healers and shamans from the Peruvian Shipibo tribe. Some of these people had shared with him that in their visions, they would see him bringing together his two most significant interests in the future - music and spiritual growth and healing, in one practice or art form. Until that moment, it had never crossed his mind that this could be it: to facilitate and play music for these ceremonies he loved dancing at so much. Since this Berlin moment, he has been shifting his activities towards this alternative dance culture founded around the millennium in Hawaii and has its roots in conscious dance practices that had been emerging on the US west and east coast since the late 70s. As a skilled music selector and curator, he is channelling all of his experience into this new field to find his very own way of creating musical journeys for these ceremonies. Koch’s adventure has moved quickly in the past three years, with him playing around 50 Ecstatic Dances in Germany, Sweden, Turkey, Spain, Poland, Holland, Mexico, Peru, and Panama. After making a name for himself as a DJ in the ED scene and growing into the facilitation of these ceremonies, the time was ripe for the next steps. Since he came back to Berlin from another long tour in the Americas in March 2020, right in the first weekend of lockdown in Germany, he started to write and produce the differing styles of music that he had been playing at Ecstatic Dances. With a couple of EPs in the pipeline under the alias Mathami as well as a new label, Pura Danza, that will be informed by his experiences in Ecstatic Dance around the globe, 2021 and beyond is an exciting time for Thomas Koch and one where he will be breaking down musical boundaries.